Women Board of Directors

The deadline for the appointment of women directors in the companies’ board has expired and there are many who have not met the deadline. What is funny is the people seem to be bemoaning the fact that the corporate India has made a mockery out of this ruling by SEBI.

It is surprising to see why people are surprised by this mockery. All one needs to do is go back a few years and see what happened when 30% quota for women was introduced at the Panchayats. The male candidate was identified and the wife of the person was made to stand for the elections.

The educational qualifications or the monetary strengths of the people do not matter. The superiority complex of the males is deeply ingrained in the human psyche for it to be lose its sheen by mandating companies to have a woman on their board. If not their relatives the relatives of their friends would have been made board members. It would be a good exercise to figure out how close to the deadline the companies appointed these ladies. It would not be surprising that most of the companies did this around the deadline and not earlier.

Similar bias exists with respect to the colour of the skin. While the whites have a superiority complex because of their skin the darker skinned ones have an inferiority complex in front of the white skins. Just observe the subservient manner in which we Indians behave in front of a white skinned person, irrespective of the status of that person.

Giriraj Singh stirred a hornet’s nest by suggesting that Congress might not have accepted Rajiv Gandhi’s wife had she been a dark coloured lady. While it is difficult to support him for his other comments it is hard to find fault with this comment given our mentality. The comment in no way demeans Sonia Gandhi or Rajiv Gandhi. It only goes to demean us as a country and he is right in this. Having said that, given our penchant for anything foreign, we may have accepted a dark skinned lady too.